A View to Review

I seem to have made it a personal mission for some reason to keep half an eye on what's going on regarding Second Life (maybe only a quarter of an eye, given that I really only notice when someone happens to mention it in some piece I was already reading; I don't actually seek out material or go into Second Life or anything so actively research-y).

Given this fact, I could not help but sit up and take notice of genomicrepairman's post on an article in Science that discusses whether grant review could be done in Second Life. The full article is subscription-only, but here's the free summary:

Can the hard work of grant review be done without face-to-face meetings? With budgets tightening, scientific organizations like the National Science Foundation are exploring ways to reduce the number of their physical meetings by holding virtual-reality meetings in the online world of Second Life. Proponents see it as a win-win scenario, saving not only time and money but also carbon emissions. Whether the technology is up to the task is another matter.

So, yeah. Grant reviews and business-meeting-type stuff. Can we do it online as effectively as in person? Can we do it online in a virtual world like Second Life more effectively than with conferencing programs?

Tune into the future for the answers to these and other fascinating questions!

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Speaking of Second Life...

This post by Anna on FWD/Forward informs me that there's a Helen Keller Mythbusting Day coming up on June 19th.

It's going to be Helen Keller Day in Second Life, with events at four in-world locations including a keynote speech, a fashion show, Braille chat, exploring with a virtual guide dog, and lots more. This highlights some of the interesting ways that the internet generally, and virtual worlds specifically, can provide new ways to make things accessible to people with different needs.

I also note in Anna's post the phrase "If I played Second Life, I would be all over this." So it's definitely not just me--there's a general perception that SL is something you kind of need to be regularly engaged in in order to get anything out of it.

I'm not sure if my idle thought about whether it might be possible to use it more casually like web-conferencing software would really work. I was thinking more about it, and really, the sign-up process may be a bit too intensive for most people to feel that it's a worthwhile investment if they're only planning to, I don't know, attend a workshop on Resource Description and Access or something.

You have to download the software and set up an account, which is also true with, say, Wimba or other programs that allow for real-time webinars and the like, so that's not particularly onerous.

But then you also have to create your avatar, which can be a time-consuming process if you want to get your hair just the right shade of purple, and then you have to learn how to move around and travel from place to place and interact with other people, and it's not especially hard, but it's not necessarily a direct transfer of previously held skills. I know it took me some time to start figuring out how to get places and find things.

It's like navigating the internet, but not exactly.

So it's one thing to say "download this software and then log into this online conference room to get audio of a speech and some Powerpoint slides and you can also chat with other people there," and another to say "download this really huge program and create a virtual representation of yourself and then log into this online world and locate this in-world location to get audio of a speech and some Powerpoint slides with a much prettier background environment and you can also see representations of the other people there that you can chat with."

I think Second Life could add something to an online conference, but I don't know if it adds enough that it would be easy to convince people to sign up and learn to use it just for that, if they didn't have a need for any accessibility features it might offer.

But since I already have an account, I'm totally in favor of having an RDA workshop there. And of course Helen Keller Day, which sounds pretty cool.

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Sometime Social Networking

We had a Medical Education Day at work, and I was perusing some posters and saw that someone has done a project on using Second Life as an educational tool.

We've heard a lot about the exciting potential here, but I was interested to see an attempt to evaluate the success. The poster presented a study in which an educational module was presented in Second Life and a survey assessed how well the material was learned and how well the participants liked the format.

They got positive results for both measures.

The way in which this study was presented made me realize that I may have been thinking about Second Life in a limiting way.

I've remained interested in it, but have kind of written it off as something I'm personally thinking about at the moment since I haven't signed in in a long time. I've been thinking of it something like a game or social network, where if you're not at least semi-regularly involved, you're not really taking full advantage of the medium.

But you could also think of it as a platform for education, like a course management program or a web conferencing site. You don't have to log into an online classroom or a web conference site on a regular basis--you only sign in when you've got a conference. And that's perfectly fine.

Maybe Second Life makes a good online environment for teaching and learning, without participants needing to be involved with it outside of that context.

Hmm.

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Second Life Lives Again?

I haven't thought of Second Life in some time, but it's come across my feed reader again, as a means of letting midwifery students experience simulations of birth situations (via Rachel at Our Bodies Our Blog). So someone is still using it!

I always think "you know, that really does sound like something with a lot of potential," and then...I just never go there.

You know what it is, I bought a Mac, and a lot of the stuff you do in SL involves left/right clicking and it's just super annoying to figure it out on a one-button mouse, so I pretty much gave up.

Hence, due to this simple technology barrier, the extended (permanent?) suspended animation of my Second Life avatar.

If only there were some way to, say, attach a two-button mouse to a laptop, so that you could use the Mac, but also have the powers of left and right clicking!

Naw, it'll never happen. That's the kind of thing you can only get in fantastic virtual worlds!

OK, so it's not just a technology barrier, it's a user-being-too-lazy-to-cross-the-technology-barrier.

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Not So Big Now, Eh Twitter?

Both Stephen's Lighthouse and Rough Type mention this Nielsen story about the fact that even though Twitter is growing by huge leaps and bounds as new people sign up every day, the site may not actually be retaining all those new sign-ups as regular users.

I recall similer stories about Second Life, back when it was the hot new thing: apparently it also had, among its vast armies of residents, millions of registered users who didn't log in regularly. (I sheepishly raise my hand here...I am presumably still a registered resident of SL, but can't be sure since I haven't signed in for months.)

Obviously there's nothing truly startling about the fact that a lot of people sign up for a trendy free service, and then don't wind up using it. (Heck, a lot of people reputedly sign up for expensive gym memberships every New Year's and then don't wind up using them.)

Signing up is how you try it out and see if you like it. If you don't like it, you let it drop, possibly without bothering to formally resign, since you never know, something might change and you might find it useful/fun/procrastenabling after all. Twitter is also pretty innocuous as a membership site: it doesn't really do anything if you don't use it.

If you had to pay for it every month, or if it constantly sent you reminders about itself, it might be more worth it to people to actually quit if they weren't using it, but as it is, why bother? There's no harm in setting up an account and then forgetting it.

No harm except THROWING OFF THE NUMBERS, that is. Horror!

This does probably mean that just because everyone in the world is apparently suddenly on Twitter, we shouldn't assume that all communication will be accomplished via this medium in the near future.

Here I was just about to take a vow of silence, too, but I suppose that had better wait until I can respond to questions at the reference desk with an imperous gesture toward my Twitter updates and not get politely removed from my job.

Oh Yeah, Second Life!

I haven't written anything, or, to be honest, thought anything, about Second Life in a while.

But as long as it's World AIDS Day, it seems a good time to note that it's still around and kicking, with a new island dedicated to HIV/AIDS education. Cool.

I sometimes think I should check out that site again, but the single-button Mac mouse isn't really SL friendly, so I tend not to get around to it. Even though I do think it has some interesting potential.

And I was thinking of making a Facebook page for the library where I work, but I can't make a Second Life island, and if I can't rule the place, what's the point, right?